On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 12:34, Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote:
> On Tuesday 30 November 2004 15:52, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> >
> > > and in this instance, you haven't cited a specific location where
> > > the Bible might be banned.
> >
> > Saudi Arabia, probably.
>
> Not likely, considering that the two bibles are among of the holy books of
> Islam.
This would be news to me.
After some quick Googling, it appears that it's legal to possess a Bible
in a foreign language if you're a foreigner. Arabic Bibles or Bibles
owned by citizens are illegal. And since the government is a
dictatorship, the "legality" is not much of a guarantee of your safety.
This would seem to make putting bible-kjv on a CD bad, but a
"bible-installer" fine.
I think this is a real issue which needs to be addressed; do we want
people in Saudi Arabia to be able to use Debian? In its current form,
they can't legally get whatever CD the bible is on.
> Think Cuba or North Korea.
>
> But seriously what does local legallity got to do with anything,
You're right. Let's just include everything we can digitize, since
there's hypothetically a country out there with no copyright law.
> we should
> distribute everything we _can_. Free software, free speech, freedom!
Sure, but it's no good for Debian-the-distribution to get banned from
every country in the world because we violate some law there. Then we
have no effect at all. It's not the mandate of Debian to do anything
outside of distribute and maintain free software, and if we do too much
SPI could probably have its non-profit status revoked.
--
Joe Wreschnig <piman@debian.org>

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